Where are the war poets? - Defence Academy of the United Kingdom

ROYAL COLLEGE OF DEFENCE STUDIES
SEAFORD HOUSE PAPER
2010/11
‘Where are the War Poets’: The Role and Place of
Contemporary British War Poetry
Colonel S R D Marr MBE

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ROYAL COLLEGE OF DEFENCE STUDIES
‘Where are the War Poets’: The Role and
Place of Contemporary British War Poetry
A DISSERTATION
BY
Colonel S R D Marr MBE
British Army
July 2011
© British Crown Copyright 2011/MOD
Published with the Permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office

INTENTIONALLY BLANK
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced printed journalism, analysis and commentary,
an explosion of first hand written accounts and narratives, films, documentaries, televised
journalism and they have been recorded by sponsored war artists. However, less is heard about war
poetry despite our rich national heritage and legacy in this particular genre. Yet contemporary war
poetry is being written and published by both established literary poets, by amateur soldier-poets
serving in operational theatres, and by the parents and friends of service personnel. This paper
highlights the role and place of today’s war poetry, arguing that this work continues the critical and
artistic dialogue by man about conflict. Following a short contextual section on definitions and the
evolution of war poetry, the paper categorises and analyses contemporary war poetry and its
authors. It identifies four vital roles for war poetry: as part of the ongoing essay on our human
condition; as a force for change; as therapy; and as part of our national record. In doing so the paper
dispels any myth that poetry is an irrelevant and moribund art form in the twenty-first century. It
offers propositions to encourage and enable the development of war poetry today: the deployment
of poets to operational theatres; the creation of a creative writing programme to support Forces’
veterans and families; and the requirement for greater visibility over that which is being written
today in order to be able to collate and publish for tomorrow’s audience. Whilst the paper has used
the poems of today and yesterday, published academic critical analysis and other contemporary
commentary, it also draws heavily on personal interviews and engagement with experts, covering a
spectrum of pre-eminent academics, published poets, poetry publishers and last, but by no means
least, the service men and women and their families who have turned to verse to articulate their
response to their experiences of today’s conflict.
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CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3
INTRODUCTION 4
SCOPE 5
BACKGROUND
The Difficulties in Defining Poetry and War 6
The Evolution of War Poetry 7
CONTEMPORARY WAR POETRY
Page
Protest Poetry 9
Finding a Credible Voice 11
Today’s Soldier-Poets and their Families 14
The War Zone Civilians 17
THE ROLES OF CONTEMPORARY WAR POETRY
The Human Condition 18
Poetry as a Force for Change 19
Poetry as Therapy 20
Securing the National Record 21
THE RELEVANCE OF POETRY TODAY 21
PROPOSITIONS
The Deployed War Poet 24
A British Operation HOMECOMING 26
Collating the Present to Secure the Future 28
IN CONCLUSION 29
BIBLIOGRAPHY 31
ANNEX A – SELECTED POEMS 36
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WHERE ARE THE WAR POETS: THE ROLE AND PLACE OF CONTEMPORARY
BRITISH WAR POETRY
INTRODUCTION
In 2014 the United Kingdom will mark the centenary of the outbreak of the 1914 -18 Great War.
We can expect carefully planned schedules of films, documentaries, museum exhibitions and print,
examining every angle of this war – the participants, the politics, the pity and the pathos of trench
warfare, and the reaction, resilience and courage of men and women in the face of such horrors. All
the standard media forms will feature – television, film, radio, art galleries, and theatre – but, at
some point, attention will inexorably shift to the poetry of the Great War and the names of the Great
War poets immortalised on a modest plaque at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. 1 Their poetry
has become part of the national psyche. It continues to be taught and studied as part of the current
English GCSE curricula, albeit with varying standards of success; there are Great War poetry
appreciation societies, web sites and volumes of critical analysis; even the current Prime Minister
cites Wilfred Owen 2 as his favourite poet. Such is this legacy that one might be forgiven for
thinking that war poetry started and ended with the Great War. 3 This would be a false presumption
however.
Today our world remains profoundly a place of conflict. While the scale of these wars can not
match those of the last century, they are no less bloody, terrifying or shocking for the participants
than their predecessors. And in our digitised and connected world, these strange, hybrid wars, in
their turn, clamour for our attention. Since 2001, Iraq and Afghanistan have produced volumes of
printed journalism, analysis and commentary, as well as an explosion of British autobiographical
accounts about fighting in the dirt and dust of Basra, Maysan and Helmand provinces. Films,
documentaries, televised journalism, and even theatre, 4 have offered insights and drama. Visual art
also adds to this rich mosaic. 5 Even rock music is muscling in. Following the release of her most
recent album, ‘Let England Shake’, with song lyrics that refer to the current conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, there has been speculation that singer-songwriter, PJ Harvey, may yet be
commissioned by the Imperial War Museum as an official ‘war singer’! 6 But, there seems to be an
absence of war poetry. One has to hunt to find reference to the ongoing conflicts, that are shaping
the early twenty-first century, in today’s British poetry scene, leaving us with a sense that war
poetry is moribund and irrelevant, and worse, that this form of discourse has had its day in the hi-tec
twenty-first century. Yet poetry is being written today that is informed either directly or indirectly
1 Richard Aldington (1892-1962), Laurence Binyon (1869-1945), Edmund Blunden (1896-1974), Rupert Brooke (1887-
1915), Wilfred Gibson (1878-1962), Robert Graves (1895-1985), Julian Grenfell (1888-1915), Ivor Gurney (1890-
1937), David Jones (1895-1974), Robert Nichols (1893-1944), Wilfred Own (1893-1918), Sir Herbert Read (1893-
1968), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Charles Sorley (1895-1915) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917). The plaque was
unveiled by the then Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, on 11 th November 1985.
2 Andrew Motion, ‘Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War – Review’, The Guardian, 13 November 2010.
3 ‘and that all war poetry ought to look like the verse of Owen et al – the stalemate of the trenches, slaughter on an
industrial scale, ‘lions led by donkeys and so on’, Andrew Motion, in conversation with the author, 10 th January 2011.
4 For example: ‘Black Watch’. Written by Gregory Burke for the National Theatre of Scotland and first staged on 1 st
August 2006; it has won a number of awards and is still being toured. And in response to the play ‘The Great Game’ –
The Times had this to say - ‘It shows that art can still tell truths that newsreels alone cannot; that the theatre of war need
not always be played out on a battlefield’, Leading Article, ‘Theatrical Troops’, The Times, 11 th January 2011, page 2.
5 The MOD continues to work closely with the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) War Artist programme to sponsor and
deploy artists to operational theatres who look, listen and translate their experiences into work for the public record.
See for example the recent works by returning British Artists, Arabella Dorman and Matthew Cook. In 2009, the
former was quoted as saying that her role was to ‘draw the public’s gaze back from the big frontages of the newspapers
and the main stories to the reality behind war and behind the frontline.’
6 "We are certainly interested in working with PJ Harvey," Roger Tolson, the head of collections at the Imperial War
Museum told Guardian.co.uk. ‘It is something we can take forward as we have never commissioned anybody in that
capacity […] We have never sent a musician out to a conflict zone”, Vanessa Thorpe, ‘PJ Harvey to be offered chance
to become ‘official war song correspondent’, The Guardian, 13 th February 2011.
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y war. The challenge is firstly to understand why that is so and then to determine whether it
deserves greater public exposure and support.
SCOPE
Taking Cecil Day Lewis’ 1943 poem, ‘Where are the war poets’, as a title for this dissertation is
perhaps disingenuous, given that his poem was a cynical retort to the media of his time, who had
called on British poets to extol the virtues and the justice of a war for national survival. 7 However,
the fundamental question, that the title poses, remains valid today. This dissertation will therefore
address the role and place of today’s British war poetry. Following a short contextual section on the
definitions and evolution of war poetry, the dissertation unpacks its title by addressing fundamental
questions along the lines of: What constitutes contemporary British war poetry Who is writing it
What are the roles of war poetry And is poetry relevant in the twenty-first century It will then
offer broad conclusions to support a proposition that, despite its low profile, today’s British war
poetry must be encouraged, nurtured, sustained and celebrated to ensure a legacy for future
generations. However, it is not the intention of this dissertation to offer critiques on today’s works.
It is for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on the variety and quality of work and a small
sample of those poets and poems that have been referenced is annexed for that purpose.
BACKGROUND
There has been a symbiotic and complex relationship between war and art since man first fashioned
his killing tools and found a creative language to articulate his triumphs and despairs. War, and
man’s role in war, has been recorded in song, sculpture, theatre, poetry and prose. Yet pairing
together the diametrically opposed acts of destruction and creation presents a peculiar paradox and
nowhere is this paradox more acutely felt, and more difficult to wrestle with, than in ‘war poetry’.
These two words present us with a neat, simple verbal construct, but they conceal challenging
abstract issues that are less easy to understand because, from the outset, we are dealing with two
concepts that defy simplistic definitions. 8
The Difficulties In Defining Poetry And War
Wordsworth described poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. (And as Jon Stallworthy points out ‘there can be no
greater range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred –
not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love – for fellow
soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally)’ . 9 ) When
asked by Mr Boswell to describe the essence of poetry, the wise Dr Johnson replied: ‘Why sir, it is
much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is’.
Alexander Pope observed that poetry is ‘What oft was thought, but n’ere so well expressed’; and
WH Auden is remembered for his description of poetry as ‘memorable speech’. Unsurprisingly
there can be no single definition for poetry. Arguably the delight and mystery of poetry is that it is
ever-changing and multifaceted, defying simplistic definition. Finding an unambiguous definition
for war is equally fraught, although many scholars expend countless hours attempting to do just
that. To avoid the pitfalls of such a rich, yet labyrinthine, academic debate, we will settle on a
7 ‘They who in folly or mere greed/Enslaved religion, markets, laws/Borrow our language now and bid/Us to speak up
in freedom’s cause/It is the logic of our times/No subject for immortal verse-/That we who lived by honest
dreams/Defend the bad against the worse’, C Day Lewis, “Where are the war poets”, The Complete Poems, (Sinclair-
Stevenson, 1992), page 335.
8 Of course, joining together ‘love’ and ‘poetry’ present similar challenges, but there is not the same dichotomy. Tim
Kendall explores this paradox in more detail - ‘One suggests destruction, the other creation; one chaos, the other order;
one pain, the other pleasure’. Tim Kendall, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall
(Oxford University Press, 2009), page 1.
9 Jon Stallworthy, Introduction, The Oxford Book of War Poetry, (Oxford University Press, 1984), page 1.
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definition from Clausewitz. His universally acknowledged dictum defined war as ‘the continuation
of politics by other means’. But as brilliant as this definition is, in speaking succinctly about the
relationships between governments and peoples and about how power is wielded, it says nothing
about the realities of war’s destructive violence, bloodshed and horror.
Therefore whilst there might be more specific definitions, 10 this dissertation uses a broad
understanding of war poetry as a form of communication that offers credible, honest, and unique
insights and truths into the realities of war, in language that should be memorable.
The Evolution Of War Poetry
The definitional skirmish over, we must now move to a cursory examination of war poetry’s
evolution. This is necessary because even a rudimentary understanding allows us to better grasp the
visceral impact of Great War poetry; which acts as such a benchmark for anything that is written
today, shaping our expectations accordingly.
The earliest war poetry or ‘war-songs’, from Greco-Roman classics (Homer’s ‘Iliad’, Virgil’s
‘Aeneid’), through Dark Ages epics (such as ‘Beowulf’), to the pre-Norman invasion (the10 th
century Anglo-Saxon ‘Battle of Maldon’), are typified as celebrations of deed rather than any
deeper commentary on the human condition. This celebration of martial merit and heroism
continues to be the defining theme of war poetry from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth
century. Given that war and combat were seen as tests of masculinity, honour, bravery and
leadership, reinforced by developing, medieval notions of chivalry, we can not therefore be
surprised that the epic poets of these times sought to immortalise their heroes as exemplars for their
own generations and for those that would follow. 11
By the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment it has been argued that ‘all literary production in the
‘long eighteenth century (1688-1832) was, to varying degrees, engaged with the subject of war’. 12
Marlborough’s victories in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-14) are commemorated in at
least 40 poems; public opinion was shaped by ‘ballads, ephemeral verse, prose satire and prints’
during the Seven Years War (1756-63) and one anthology of war poetry from the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) boasts over 1,360 texts. 13 However, these poems
are no longer restricted to martial tales of heroic endeavour and present greater realism about the
horrors of battle – there is a developing sense that war impacts very personally on men in uniform
and their families. 14
10 For General Sir John Hackett war poetry is: ‘…unlikely to be written except in wartime. It is the product of the
pressures and tensions, the pangs and passions, the fears and frenzy, the loneliness, excitement, boredom and despair,
the disgust, the compassion and the weariness, and all the other stimuli to self-expression which, though they are not
found uniquely in wartime, react then upon the human condition with special force, ‘A Preliminary Note’, Poems of the
Second world War: The Oasis Selection, (Everyman’s Library, 1990), page viii.
11 Although not everyone got to be immortalised as Horace cynically notes: ‘In vain they schemed, in vain they bled /
They had no poet and are dead’, Odes, translated by Alexander Pope, 4.97.25, cited by LV Pitcher, ‘Classical War
Literature’, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, ed Kate McLoughlin, (Cambridge University Press, 2009),
page 73.
12 Gillian Russell, ‘The Eighteenth Century and the Romantics on War’, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, ed
Kate McLoughlin, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), page 112. Russell goes on to say: ‘Most of the major writers of
the period in the British Isles and Ireland, ranging from Swift to Austen, from Pope to Barbauld, addressed the topic of
war, either directly or indirectly.’ Op Cit, page 112.
13 ‘These polite texts, designed for middling and elite audiences, were linked with a vital popular tradition of ballad and
chapbook literature that circulated stories and songs of the heroism, suffering and loss of soldiers and sailors and their
families’, Op Cit, page 112.
14 ‘even ‘limited’ war was shocking in its brutality, with 24,000 dead in one day at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709’,
ibid, pages 115-116.
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We now think of a Victorian era redolent of poetry suffused with glory and victory. Preservation
and expansion of Empire called for patriotism, selfless duty and sacrifice – a noble Christian duty to
fight, and if necessary die, in the defence of one’s belief system, when called upon to do so; a theme
which appears to be broadly reflected in the art of the times. 15 But perhaps there was a more subtle
undercurrent at play. We are now challenged to see the ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the
great Victorian epic of duty and honour, as an event that is both ‘ennobling and horrifying’. 16 In
the same essay, Matthew Bevis goes on to cite Trudi Tate’s observation that this epic poem is ‘often
regarded as a simple-minded piece of patriotism, [but that] it is in fact a subtle and even anguished
reflection upon the Crimean War’. 17 And as that century comes to a close, Kipling’s work gives an
authentic voice to the everyman British soldier, Tommy Atkins, (an occupation considered fit only
for the dregs of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and the reader is seduced into
taking both heart and comfort from Tommy’s humour, stoicism and bravery as he defends the outer
edges of the Empire. 18 But again we must be careful of our first impressions, because Kipling also
makes clear that being a soldier brings with it fear, pain and a lonely, unheroic death - ‘When
you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come out to cut up your
remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’ 19
Yet when the Great War begins, once again the over-riding atmosphere is one of patriotic zeal, the
opportunity to test oneself, a delight in being able to defend King and Country and this is reflected
in the verse of the time 20 – Jon Stallworthy describes this extraordinary elation at going to war as
‘the appallingly anachronistic concept of war as a game’ and emphasises the impact of a classical
public school education on the war poetry of 1914 and 1915 with ‘countless references to sword and
legion, not a few to chariot and oriflamme, but almost none to gun and platoon […] the poems of
these young men move us…..they illustrate the hypnotic power of a long cultural tradition; the
tragic outcome of educating a generation to face not the future, but the past’. 21 But by 1916 the
poetry from the front is markedly different. John H Johnston’s study into this genre from 1964
perhaps best summarises what has happened – ‘Never before in literature had war been described
with this painful compression of action and incident, with this narrowing of focus, this
fragmentation of reality, this obsessive emphasis on isolated and irrelevant sensory details’ with the
war poet’s role ‘to communicate his sense of the reality of war to the millions at home who would
not or could not appreciate the magnitude of the experiences and sacrifices of the common
soldier’. 22 By the close of the Great War, the poet has moved from being an observer to being a
victim. His poems make uncomfortable reading. They are filled with the paradox of destruction
and creation - anger, joy, frustration, futility, despair, exaltation, betrayal, humour, disillusionment,
pity, joy, camaraderie, isolation – all of which relate back to Wordsworth’s description of ‘powerful
15 In a lecture at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1865, John Ruskin told his audience that ‘There is no great
art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle’, John R. Reed, ‘The Victorians and War’, The Cambridge
Companion to War Writing, ed Kate McLoughlin, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), page 135.
16 Matthew Bevis, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press,
2009), page 14. (Author’s italics and underlining)
17 Trudi Tate, ‘On Not Knowing Why: Memorialising the Light Brigade’ , in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds)
Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, (Oxford University Press, 2003),
page 166. Cited by Matthew Bevis, Ibid, page 15.
18 ‘The soldier comes of age in Victorian poetry and culture as the methods of warfare themselves reach a terrifying
maturity, and the figure now enjoys a new kind of privilege as he completes the metamorphosis from scapegoat to
underdog’. Matthew Bevis, ibid, page 25.
19 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Young British Soldier’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, page 418. For a more detailed analysis of
Kipling, see Daniel Karlin’s ‘From Dark Defile to Gethsemane’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry,
ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 51-69.
20 See in particular Rupert Brooke – ‘Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour…’, ‘Peace’, sourced
from Michael Wylie (ed.), ‘The War Poets: An Anthology’, (Pitkin Publishing, 2010), page 18.
21 Jon Stallworthy, ‘The death of the hero’, Survivors’ Songs, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pages 12-13.
22 John H Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form,
(Princeton University Press, 1964), pages 12-13.
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feelings’ - one person, the poet, reports to another, the reader, in a straightforward and realistic way.
Thus the benchmark for our expectations of war poetry in the remainder of the twentieth century,
and now the twenty-first century, is established.
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH WAR POETRY
War Poetry Without Going To War
Responding to today’s wars can be problematic for our established poets. 23 Any attempt to
replicate the emotions of those touched by war without genuine first hand experience of an
operational theatre can attract opprobrium from contemporaries, critics, academics and audiences.
Poets can expose themselves to accusations of fake sentimentality, glorification, sensationalism,
voyeuristic intrusion, political posturing or cynical profiteering. Yet despite the challenges there
are poets with genuine and credible voices, who can reveal a new truth or provoke a range of
emotions in today’s war-weary readership.
‘What’re You Rebelling against Johnny’ - ‘Whaddya Got’ 24 : Protest Poetry
Poems written with the clear purpose of denouncing participation in an ongoing specific conflict are
a particularly contentious area. ‘Protest poetry’ is typified by an unswerving commitment to
wearing politics on a poetical sleeve, but polemics in poetry is nothing new. There are interesting
parallels to be drawn between the pro-war response to the Spanish Civil War and the anti-war
response to the Vietnam War. In the Thirties, instead of opposing war and its concomitant horrors,
those poets and authors with particularly strong left wing sympathies advocated and encouraged
support of the Republican Movement by all means possible including the necessity for volunteers to
fight and die. 25 In the Sixties, this particular style of protest was given new life in the USA during
the Vietnam War when any number of ‘stateside poets’ made clear their disgust at the involvement
of US troops in this discretionary action in East Asia. 26
Fast forward to another discretionary war in Asia at the start of this century, again with starkly
drawn political battle-lines, and we see a similar poetical response. Coincident with the period
during which Hans Blix presented his controversial reports on the Iraq Weapons of Mass
Destruction programme to the United Nations, ‘100 Poets against the War’ was published in the
USA firstly on line on 27 th January 2003 and then in hard copy on 3 rd March 2003, complete with
the tag line that ‘this book holds the record for the fastest poetry anthology ever assembled and
disseminated’. 27 The Times referred to its arrival as ‘a new lease of life for protest poetry’. Web
sites specifically for protest poetry were also set up in response to the decision to invade Iraq, and
23 This inelegant term has been used to describe those poets who have been published and who are recognised as
masters of their craft. Equally the term professional could have been used. The intention is to distinguish between
those whose careers and reputations are built on their published output as opposed to those who scribble away knowing
that their work is unlikely to be published or receive public exposure.
24 With apologies to Johnny Strabler and Mildred in Laslo Benedek’s ‘The Wild One’ (Columbia, 1953)
25 For example see, WH Auden’s ‘Spain ’. Written following a short sojourn in Spain (in itself a reflection of Auden’s
desire to gain first hand experience of this war in order to be able to write more credibly), this poem was originally
published as a pamphlet to raise medical aid for Spain. It was retitled ‘Spain 1937’ and published in ‘Another Time’,
(Random House, 1940). Following his own damascene disillusionment with the anti-clericism, brutality and corruption
of the Republican Movement, Auden then rejected this poem and had it removed from his collections in later life. For
more, see Rainer Emig, ‘Unwriting the Good Fight’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim
Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 264-278.
26 A rejuvenated US folk music scene had also found its voice in ‘protest songs’, predominately in response to the civil
rights movements, epitomised by Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. The music scene soon however turned its
attention to Vietnam, exemplified perhaps by Joan Baez, Country Joe Macdonald and others of the Woodstock
Generation. Interestingly, Dylan never directly referenced the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, preferring to approach his
subject obliquely in songs such The Gates of Eden’ and‘Desolation Row’.
27 ‘100 Poets Against the War’, ed Todd Swift, (Salt Publishing, 2003). Quotation taken from Salt Publishing web site
– www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1876857986.htm
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subsequently Afghanistan. The largest -www.poetsagainstthewar.org - a US site established in
early 2003 by its editor, Sam Hamill, called on poets to ‘speak for the conscience of our country’.
However, Hamill ceased requests for submissions in mid 2010 having collected nearly 30,000
poems from 26,000 poets, although the anthology can still be accessed through the site. Explaining
the decision to cease publishing new poems, Hamill cryptically quoted the English poet, Geoffrey
Hill: ‘The burden (that) the writer’s conscience must bear is that the horror (of war) might become
that hideously outrageous thing, a cliché’. Arguably after thirty thousand poems with an
aggressively, one-dimensional and uniform polemic, all that such an organic on-line anthology
could ever offer was over-familiar cliché.
Faber’s publication of its own ‘101 Poems against War’, 28 complete with an afterword from our
then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, was similar in tone and an unsurprising response. However,
given the title of this 2003 collection, it is clear where the editors’ politics lay. In common with
Hamill’s web site, the problem with such narrowly themed, and politically charged, anthologies is
that the poets (and/or their editors) are obliged to take a moral and political stand point that
seemingly brooks no alternative. In his review of this particular anthology, David Wheatley
highlighted this dilemma, suggesting that ‘they’re (the poets) too sure they’re on the side of
angels’. 29 This is not to denigrate such an anthology, but rather to sound a note of caution at its
limitations.
In his essay, ‘The Few to Profit’, Tim Kendall further explores both the motives and the credibility
of the ‘protest poet’ – ‘To read anti-war poetry as purely opportunistic is to risk seeming
ungenerous […] Anti-war poets, it is difficult not to conclude, are honourable men and women. Yet
poetry fails to serve democracy, as well as its own well-being, if it adopts democracy’s failings by
stooping to the linguistic crudity of the political realm’. 30 Kendall is also quick to point out that
pro-war poetry is likely to be equally unbalanced and compromised. Looking back at Vietnam, Jon
Stallworthy questions the credibility of ‘armchair poets pretending ‘[..] to first-hand witness and/or
degrees of moral commitment to which they were not entitled’. He cites Anthony Hecht’s powerful
‘Here lies Strephon’ as the ultimate rebuke to a ‘Stateside Poet’, who profits from protesting against
Vietnam, yet has neither served nor visited the country. 31 Indeed, in his own ‘A poem about Poems
About Vietnam’, Stallworthy demands of the ‘protest poet’ ‘by what right did you wear / suffering
like a service medal / numbing the nerve that they laid bare, / when you were at the Albert Hall’ 32
– a swipe at the 1965 Albert Hall poetry reading – Poets of the World/Poets of our Time. 33
‘Well Then, What Can A Poor Boy Do’ 34 : Finding a Credible Voice
Gareth Reeves continues this theme of non-combatant poets’ approaches to, and their relationship
with, wars past and present in a recent essay and asks ‘What right have non-participants to speak of
agonies they have not experienced directly’, challenging us to determine whether silence is ‘an act
of wilful ignorance’ or whether silence in response to what is happening around one is ‘to be
unknowingly complicit’. 35 Given that hard earned reputations are ultimately at stake, it becomes
more understandable that, in order to preserve both artistic integrity and credibility, few established
British poets, who have not had direct military experience, are prepared to risk writing about wars
28 ‘101 Poems against War’, ed Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis, (Faber and Faber, 2003).
29 David Wheatley, ‘Posturing for Peace’, The Guardian, 25 th May 2003, page 25.
30 Tim Kendall, ‘The Few to Profit’, ‘Modern English War Poetry’, (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 238-257.
31 Jon Stallworthy, ‘The Fury and the Mire’, Survivors’ Songs, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pages 186-188.
32 Jon Stallworthy, ‘A poem about Poems about Vietnam’, ‘Rounding the Horn – Collected Poems’, (Carcanet, 2005),
page 78.
33 For further background on the Albert Hall reading see Barry Miles, ‘London Calling: A Countercultural History of
London since 1945’, (Atlantic Books, pages 144-158).
34 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, ‘Street Fighting Man’, ‘Beggars Banquet’, (Decca, 1968).
35 Gareth Reeves, ‘This is plenty. This is more than enough: Poetry and the memory of the second world war’, The
Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 580-591.
9

or those that fight in them (‘protest poetry’ aside). But to the layman, there is the distinct risk that
this intellectual argument either smacks of arcane poetic politics, or is a convenient excuse to keep
the issue of war at a very long arms’ length. The dilemma for the established poet is therefore how
to address contemporary events without compromising artistic integrity, and to do so in language
and emotion that rings clear and feels true.
Carol Ann Duffy was willing to risk the opprobrium. Writing in The Guardian on 25 th July 2009,
she observed that: “British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war […..] War, it seems,
makes poets of soldiers and not the other way round. Today, as most of us do, poets largely
experience war - wherever it rages - through emails or texts from friends or colleagues in war zones,
through radio or newsprint or television, through blogs or tweets or interviews.” 36 Against that
context, the newly appointed Poet Laureate invited a number of her contemporaries ‘to bear
witness’ and their poems were duly published in the Guardian. 37 However there is a danger that
this approach reinforces the prejudices of those who would dismiss these poems as ‘more of the
same from the usual armchair liberal suspects’. We must satisfy ourselves that this work is credible
and authentic. Otherwise there is a danger that it is nothing more than a passing nod to today’s
conflicts - a superficial response at best, leaving a cynical impression that such work can be easily
‘knocked off’ – because war poetry ‘written to order’ will neither ring clear nor feel true.
This case for credibility might be strengthened if the poet waits until hostilities cease before
offering comment. Two particular contrasting examples, published after the First Gulf War in
1991, deserve mention. ‘A Cold Coming’ by Tony Harrison 38 sets up an imaginary interview
between the poet and a charred Iraqi corpse caught in a vehicle on the Kuwait to Basra ‘Highway of
Death’ 39 (the photograph of this particular body has become an iconic portrayal of the slaughter).
Whilst there is no doubting the poet’s disgust, the emotion is controlled, forcing the reader to reach
his own judgement. Perhaps it was for this reason that The Guardian chose to reprint the poem on
14 th February 2003. It is interesting to note that, following a series of poems on the realities of war
in Bosnia in 1995, Harrison was subsequently awarded the Wilfred Own Poetry Award in 2007. 40
‘American Football – A Reflection upon the Gulf War’ by Harold Pinter, demonstrates Pinter’s
‘obsession with the gulf between language and fact’. 41 A lifelong pacifist, Pinter was dismayed at
the use of clinical language to describe man’s viciousness – ‘surgical bombing’ and ‘collateral
damage’. In contrast his poem was rejected for publication by The Independent, The Observer, The
Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. 42 Rejected because
perhaps its language was too shocking in its profanity or rejected because, unlike Harrison’s ‘A
Cold Coming’, it is fundamentally a less memorable war poem, leaving the reader little intellectual
room to manoeuvre and make judgements for himself.
36 Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Exit wounds’, The Guardian, 25 th July 2009.
37 ‘In times of peace’ – John Agard; ‘Listen’ – Gillian Clarke; ‘War on terror’ – Fred D’Aguiar; ‘Untidiness’ – Amanda
Dalton; ‘Big Ask’ – Carol Ann Duffy; ‘The Grassington mandala’ – Ian Duhig; ‘Landlock’ – Matthew Hollis; ‘Descent’
– Alan Jenkins; ‘Inquiry’ – Carola Luther; ‘After the stealth bomber’ – Robert Minhinnick; ‘Afghanistan’ – Paul
Muldoon; ‘Have I got old news for you’ – Daljit Nagra; ‘Of course if I can help in any way’ – Sean O’Brien; ‘Battle
Lines’ – Carole Satyamurti; ‘St Brides’ – Jo Shapcott; ‘It could have been’ – Clare Shaw; ‘Poppies’ – Jane Weir.
38 Tony Harrison, ‘A Cold Coming’, specially commissioned orginally printed by The Guardian, 1991 and reprinted by
The Guardian, 14 th February 2003.
39 ‘…littered with (the) remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred, dismembered bodies of tens
of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26 th and 27 th 1991 in compliance with
UN resolutions’, International War Crimes Tribunal, Web Site – http://deoxy.org.wc/wc-death.htm
40 The Wilfred Owen Association presents a biennial Poetry Award to honour a poet for a sustained body of work that
includes memorable war poems. For further detail see: www.wilfredowen.org.uk/wilfred-owen-association/wilfredowen-poetry-award
(author’s italics).
41 Harold Pinter, ‘American Football – A Reflection on the Gulf War’,
www.haroldpinter.org/poetry/poetry_football.htm
42 Ibid.
10

Another option is for the poet to follow Capability Brown’s advice ‘to espy the objective and
approach obliquely’, or as Fiona Sampson (paraphrasing Emily Dickinson) put it: ‘tell the whole
truth, but tell it slant’. 43 Sarah Maguire took this approach in her 2007 ‘The Pomegranates of
Kandahar’. She links the traditional Afghan crop of pomegranates with the more deadly crop of
land mines, but does so in language that is precise, but non-judgmental, forcing readers to draw
their own conclusions. 44 Whilst she has not visited Afghanistan, her work as the founder and
director of the Poetry Translation Centre, has given her numerous contacts in the Middle East and
South Asia, and it is from these friends, colleagues and fellow poets, with genuine and credible
experience of conflict, that she draws the inspiration for her work.
Andrew Motion also addressed war obliquely in his 2009 Faber collection, writing about Harry
Patch (Great War veteran) and memories of his own father (a veteran of the Normandy landings and
the advance to Berlin). 45 Both of these subjects have been carried forward into his most recent
publication, ‘Laurels and Donkeys’. 46 This collection also gives us new poems addressing the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan. In order to close the credibility gap, Motion has used ‘found voices’ in
which the narratives of real veterans have been used - ‘Collaborations that lift things out of prose
accounts into the realm of things that look like poems’ 47 – and these deliver a far greater authentic,
genuine and powerful voice. 48 Motion is not alone in his use of ‘found voices’. 49 Simon Armitage
has produced similarly authentic and moving verse using the voices of three veterans from the
Malayan campaign, Bosnia and the First Gulf War. 50 As recently as 29 th October 2010, Fiona
Sampson argued in The Independent for poets ‘who [can] engage with the contemporary facts of
war, but in ways that demonstrate an integrity appropriate to their own time and place’, citing in
particular ‘Legion’ 51 by David Harsent, which ‘is inflected by the fate of friends who lived through
the siege of Sarajevo’. 52
But before leaving this section, we cannot overlook the fact that there is at least one published,
award winning contemporary established poet who better fits the traditional image of an Owen or
Sassoon. Sadly (as far as this dissertation is concerned), he is American, not British. Brian Turner
achieved a Masters degree in poetry prior to enlisting in the US Army. He comes from a family
with a tradition of military duty and served seven and a half years with the US Army, including
operational tours of Kosovo and Iraq. He offers powerful insights into the minds of young
American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad, and the realities of the Iraqi combat zone, occupying
characters and giving them voice. His verse is suffused with the credibility and authenticity of the
first hand, both as a serving soldier and now as a civilian coming to terms with his memories. 53
Perhaps it is this genuine authenticity and uniqueness of voice (as well as the convenient, and edgy,
label of ‘war poet’) that persuaded the British judges to short-list him for the prestigious TS Eliot
Poetry Prize earlier this year - particularly given the absence of any similar home-grown talent.
43 Fiona Sampson, in conversation with the author, 28 th January, 2011.
44 Sarah Maguire, ‘The Pomegranates of Kandahar’, (Chatto and Windus, 2007). Random House feel able to say that
‘her poems have been praised for their way they ground their precise and sensual details within the global political
context without becoming didactic or polemical’ (www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display)
45 Andrew Motion, The Cinder Path, (Faber and Faber, 2009).
46 Andrew Motion, Laurels and Donkeys, (Clutag Press, 2010).
47 Andrew Motion, in conversation with the author, 10 th January 2011.
48 See ‘The Next Thing, ‘Lions and Donkeys’, (Clutag Press, 2010), pages 29-30.
49 Arguably, Found Voices are not a new poetic tool. In 1915 Wilfred Gibson published ‘Breakfast’ and ‘The
Messages’ (both stark exposes of trench life), as well as other short poems in a little book, ‘Battle’, based on letters and
anecdotes from serving soldiers. For more see Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (Eds), The Winter of the World:
Poems of the Great War’, (Constable, 2008), pages xiv-xvii.
50 See, for example, Simon Armitage, ‘Albion’ and ‘Warriors’, The Not Dead, (Pomona Press, 2008).
51 David Harsent, ‘Legion’, (Faber, 2005). See also David Wheatley, ‘dichtung und warheit’, The Oxford Handbook of
British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 662-665.
52 Fiona Sampson, ‘Poetic reports on today’s Front Line’, The Independent, 29 th October 2010.
53 Brian Turner , Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, (Bloodeaxe Books, 2007 and 2010).
11

‘Can I Get A Witness’ 54 : Today’s Soldier Poets And Their Families
If this country can not yet boast a Brian Turner figure, are there British understudies waiting in the
wings The answer can not be an emphatic yes, but we may yet be surprised. On 9 th November
2008, The Sunday Times published an extensive article by Cathy Galvin which drew attention to a
number of serving ‘soldier poets fighting for their country’. This must have surprised many
readers. In today’s professional armed forces it seems highly unlikely that men and women, who
already write poetry, will feel an urge to join up (‘not overlapping career paths!’ 55 ). And despite the
improvements in national education over the last forty years, there is always a nagging feeling that
soldiers who are moved to write poetry today may not be representative of all ranks. It is still an
inescapable fact that the literacy levels of many of the junior ranks in today’s British Armed Forces
(particularly the infantry who are at the sharpest of ends of the vicious tactical level battlefields of
Iraq and Afghanistan) often fall well short of the national average. This is in stark contrast to the
Great War and the Second World War. In both those wars of national survival, small standing
professional armed forces were soon subsumed by the huge armies made possible through
conscription. Inevitably these citizen armies contained individuals with pre-developed poetic
sensitivities and literary skills and for them combat became both a catalyst and a cathartic release.
That is not to say that the ranks of the British line in both the Great War and the Second World War
were filled with soldier poets - the ratios of uniformed soldier poets against their contemporaries
were particularly small. This statistic suggests therefore that we should significantly moderate any
expectations that today’s conflicts will produce serving British soldier poets. It is therefore perhaps
even more surprising and exciting that, against a figure of ten thousand deployed service personnel,
there are a larger than expected number of soldiers, of all ranks, translating their combat
experiences into poetry. 56
Very occasionally we learn about these individuals because they are picked out for public attention.
The Galvin article, cited earlier, published short biographies on, and extracts of work by, for
example, Lieutenant Colonel ‘JB’ Brown, Warrant Officer Tony Davies, David Hamilton, Corporal
Chantelle Powell and Officer Cadet Aris Roussinos. And in 2008, The Daily Mail chose to publish
a poem by Staff Sergeant Andy McFarlane about a repatriation ceremony; published perhaps
because its political sentiments chimed with those of the Daily Mail, but published nonetheless. 57
However, for the most part, the work of today’s service personnel goes unnoticed, circulated on the
internet privately or posted anonymously on websites - www.forcespoetry.com ,
www.warpoetry.co.uk are two examples. Forces Poetry is part of the wider Forces Literary
Organisation Worldwide. It now boasts over three thousand poems by almost five hundred
different authors in forty-six different categories, not all of which, however, relate directly to war in
Iraq or Afghanistan. It is also not easy to discern how much work has been produced by serving
service personnel or families and veterans and how much is from sympathetic civilians. The latter
site is more focussed and has become something of a repository for both serving and retired British
service personnel. Take, for example, Alex Cockerill - a serving Royal Marine between 2005-2009
- who has published six poems on the site because ‘during my fourteen months in Afghanistan, I
had many feelings and thoughts that I was unable to share with anyone. Under the stars, in the
54 Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland (performed by Marvin Gaye), ‘Can I get a Witness’, (Tamla
Motown, 1963).
55 Andrew Motion, in conversation with the author 11 th January 2011. Although clearly Brian Turner determined that
this convergence of career paths was necessary for him.
56 There can be no such thing as a definitive figure. But research of anthologies, web sites and conversations with
interested parties indicates a growing critical mass of well over fifty individuals.
57 “A British soldier fighting in Afghanistan has written a pointed poem accusing ministers of 'hiding' when the bodies
of fallen troops are returned to the UK. The scathing verses, written from the front line, attacks (sic) politicians for
avoiding the ever frequent ceremonies held when the coffins arrive back on British soil. Entitled ‘Repatriation’, the
poem is circulating among UK troops in Helmand Province and across the world after it was posted on Facebook”, The
Daily Mail, (17 th August 2009).
12

desert, rhymes would manifest in my head, I would write them down, construct them into poems
and somehow felt better for getting it off my chest’. 58 Whilst it is a gross over-generalisation, even
a cursory scan reveals that the poems of today’s soldier-poets address the same familiar themes as
their twentieth century forebears – fear, loss, grief, loneliness, anger, isolation and comradeship.
Another veteran worth noting is John Jeffcock, a retired Coldstream Guards officer with operational
experience in the First Gulf War, Northern Ireland and Bosnia. Although he had written poems
before joining the Army, following his retirement from the services, he refined his skills through an
academic course and published his first collection in November 2009. 59
The internet can offer many variations on a theme for likeminded cyber communities and clearly
war poetry is catered for, but are there any formal or indeed informal organisations that exist to
support and encourage today’s solider-poets After five years in Helmand, there is no evidence of
an informal British in-house poetry or arts society in Lashkar Ghar (or in the UK) that attempt to
corral talent in the same way that, for example, Oasis did in the Western Desert during the Second
World War. 60 In contrast, Brian Turner (one of at least four members of his platoon in Iraq that
wrote poetry - although he only learnt this after his operational deployment) described a unique
weekly event in one of the US patrol bases in Iraq – an open microphone poetry session - an event
more understandable, perhaps, in the context of the US rap/hip-hop tradition where blacks and
whites take pride in their ability to produce their ‘flow’. 61
The families of British service personnel, whose lives have been changed forever, have also turned
to poetry to voice their feelings. Priscilla Dicketts is the mother of Corporal Oliver Dicketts, one of
the fourteen personnel killed during the notorious NIMROD XV230 crash at Kandahar,
Afghanistan in 2006. In response to her own loss, and encouraged by the letters of support that she
received from many others, she has collated poems, prose and free verse from the bereaved and
from those still serving. She published a modest anthology at her own expense in December 2010
with all subsequent proceeds going to the charity ‘Talking2Minds’. 62 Following an initial print run
of five hundred copies, she is planning a second edition to be published this year. This project did
not have the MOD’s support behind it however – rather the MOD sought to exercise a degree of
editorial control, and in a laughably ironic manner, wished to confirm that the draft did not contain
anything that might be judged ‘offensive’. 63
‘Didja Get Any Onya’ 64 : The War Zone Civilians
On 8 th August 2009, The Times responded to Duffy’s call to her fellow poets to bear witness to Iraq
and Afghanistan with an article by Erica Wagner in which she rightly reminded us that there are
58 For more on Alex Cockerill and his fellow soldier poets, see www.warpoetry.co.uk/Afghanistan_War_Poetry.html
59 John Jeffcock, The Book of War, (Kassala Publishing, 2009)
60 ‘[The Oasis was established in] Cairo, 1942 by a group of junior soldiers, the most senior a Corporal…The archive
grew to over 17000 poems and is now held in the Imperial War Museum’, Major Bruce Pennell RLC, ‘Where are the
war poets’, (British Army Review, Spring 2005, number 136). ‘The North African campaign generated an astonishing
poetic harvest, though it was not until Victor Selwyn’s retrospective ‘Return to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections
from the Middle East’ (1980) that the scale of literary invention in this particular theatre of war could be fully
documented.’, Hugh Haughton, ‘Anthologizing War’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim
Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), page 433.
61 Brian Turner, in conversation with the author, 24 th January 2011.
62 Priscilla Dicketts (ed), ‘Dark Clouds and Silver Lining:A Collection of Writings by Serving British Servicemen and
Servicewomen, their Families and Friends’, (PSF Publications, 2010). None of the work in the collection has been
attributed to individuals – anonymity was an incentive for contributors. General Sir Rob Fry is quoted as saying ‘this
book is about the wars we fight now, but there is more to it than that. It taps into an unbroken tradition which perhaps
started with Fluellen at Agincourt, proceeded through Rifleman Harris in the Peninsular, and reached probably its finest
form with Owen, Rosenberg and the others in the First World War […] it is both of its time and timeless […] and is a
worthy custodian of everything it represents’. www.priscilladicketts.co.uk/
63 Priscilla Dicketts, in conversation with the author, 2 nd February 2011.
64 Frank Zappa, ‘Didja Get Any Onya’, ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’, (Zappa Records, 1970).
13

poets, who are not part of any military apparatus (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone), for
whom living with conflict is an intimate and direct daily experience, which is inevitably reflected in
their work. 65 These are the innocents caught up in war – the bombed and displaced populations,
the victims of military brutality and blunders, the ‘collateral damage’ – the vast numbers of ordinary
people unwittingly swept up in conflict through an accident in race, colour, religion or geography.
These are voices that have borne and continue to bear witness to war, although given the geography
of today’s conflicts, they are unlikely to be British voices. Of course the conduct of war in the
twenty-first century (and in the latter part of the twentieth century) is no longer the sole prerogative
of military forces –there are now any number of British civilians, male and female, in operational
theatres that become either willingly or unwillingly part of the machinery of conflict – be they
journalists, members of both International Organisations and Non-Government Organisations or
civil servants. And there is precedent for the war-zone civilian poet. For example, James Fenton, a
British freelance reporter in Indo-China in the 1970s and then in Germany, published ‘’The
Memory of war’ in 1981 and of whose poems (and ‘Dead Soldiers’ in particular) Stallworthy says
‘The power and poignancy [..] derives from Fenton’s first-hand experience of human suffering’. 66
Unfortunately, this dissertation has not been able to evidence poetry by comparable British civilian
observers in today’s war zones. Research with British civil officials who have served in both Iraq
and Afghanistan, found at least one individual for whom poetry ‘was a particularly good way of
expressing emotion…its very personal…I wanted to express personal grief and frustration which I
couldn’t express to anyone else really’, and it is not too great a leap of faith to deduce that there are
potentially many others, who could be contributing anonymously to the web sites. 67 In that context
it is worth noting Stallworthy’s observation that, given the size, style and character of today’s
professional military forces, there is now a greater likelihood that war poetry is more likely to be
written by a civilian than a soldier. 68
THE ROLES OF CONTEMPORARY WAR POETRY
Despite the definitional difficulties, despite the issues of credibility and authenticity, and despite the
minefields of poetic semantics, it is the contention of this dissertation that contemporary war poetry
still fulfils fundamental roles which bear summarising.
The Human Condition
First and most importantly, war poetry continues to be part of man’s dynamic self-critical essay on
our humanity and condition. Truly memorable poems can do more in a few words to educate us on
the realities of war – blood, pain, life, death, barbarism, heroism, horror and joy – than many
lengthier books on the same subject 69 . Whilst there are any number of poems that could be cited to
illustrate this argument (and the use of only one example does expose analytical flanks) there can
not be many readers who are not moved profoundly by Anthony Hecht’s ‘More Light, More
Light’. 70 In sixty-four lines, Hecht, a Jewish poet and veteran of the Second World War, takes us
from the burning of a sixteenth century Christian martyr to ‘casual death’ in Nazi killing fields. He
shows us that despite four centuries of human development, our basest ability to inflict brutality
remains unchecked. The poem invokes despair, shock and disbelief in the reader at the levels of
atrocity to which man can descend.
65 Erica Wagner, ‘The Real War Poets’ The Times, 8 th August 2009. She cites, for example: Afghanistan – Partaw
Naderi, Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal; Iraq – Kajal Ahmad, Saadi Yousef; Gaza – Nasr Jamil Shaath, Khaled Abdallah;
Somalia – Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’.
66 Jon Stallworthy, ‘The Fury and the Mire’, ‘Survivors’ Songs’, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), page 192.
67 A British civil official, who wishes to remain anonymous, in conversation with the author, 20 th February.
68 Jon Stallworthy, ‘The Fury and the Mire’, ‘Survivors’ Songs’, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), page 194.
69 ‘The power of literature lies not in the capacity of reassurance, let alone in moral instruction, but in broadening
readers’ appreciation of enduring human concerns’, Editorial, The Times, 6 th January 2011.
70 Anthony Hecht, ‘More Light More Light’, ‘Collected Earlier Poems’, (Random House, 1990), pages 64-65.
14

Almost every academic work on war poetry will reference Wilfred Owen’s observation that ‘My
subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity […] All a poet can today is to warn’. 71
Given the proclivity for national intervention in today’s geo-strategic environment, there is an even
more compelling need to be warned; the pity of war bears repetition. Despite the competing medias
available to communicate war to us, we still need poets, and in particular today’s soldier-poets and
those who experience war at first hand, to use this higher form of artistic discourse to say ‘look –
see what is happening around me’, offering insights, that may run counter to the prevailing views,
to challenge our perceptions.
Poetry as a Force for Change
Self-evidently, as has been demonstrated, poetry has a valid role as a lucid voice of legitimate
protest. How different would we feel if poets, and indeed broader society, were apathetic to the
point that government decisions of such magnitude as taking the country to war, failed to invoke
questioning, protest and opposition WH Auden once famously observed that poetry can not make
things happen, and others have followed suit by saying that poetry can not change anything. 72 But,
even if we do not believe that Auden’s words were in fact an inverted, intellectual challenge for
poetry to be bold and a force for good, this line of reasoning is still weak. The power of poetics can
not be so simply dismissed. The response by this country to the Iraq War on 12 th February 2003 is
instructive. Why did almost a million people of all ages, but predominately young people, march
with such passion Is it because our national psyche has been so seared by the Great War poets’
descriptions of the vile nature of warfare that we are prepared to stand up and question further
engagement in war More philosophically there are plenty of arguments that make the case for the
power of the written word. By way of an example, Melvin Bragg recently made a compelling case
for the poetics of the King James VI Bible – in a BBC television programme on 7 th March 2011, he
argued that this work of poetic literature was ‘the seedbed of western democracy, the activator of
radical shifts in society such as the abolition of the slave trade, the debating dynamic for brutal civil
wars in Britain and America and a critical spark in the genesis of modern science’. 73
This is not to suggest that poetry today can make things different tomorrow. Certainly the
publication of ‘100 Poets Against The War’, the ‘poets against the war’ web sites and ‘101 Poems
Against The War’ did not alter the political decision-making nor the plans to invade and occupy
Iraq in early 2003, but perhaps that was never their purpose. Instead these poems, both in 2003 and
today, represent a body of argument that, along with public rallies and other forms of protest, serves
to act as a conscience for those in power. It reminds them that the participation of a nation in war
must be both legitimate and appropriate. Further, however limited in scope and however political
such work may be, its publication offers a wider readership the opportunity to question their own
views.
Speaking Truth to Life: Poetry As Therapy
The diffuse source for today’s contemporary British war poetry from serving service personnel,
service families and veterans has much to say about the intended audience. It suggests that the
majority of work has not been written for public consumption, but rather as a form of cathartic or
therapeutic release for the writer. The vital, therapeutic function that poetry plays for individuals
who are affected deeply by their experience of combat, loss, injury or any other myriad of human
emotion is not new. ‘Therapy’ comes from the Greek therapeia meaning to cure through
participation in one of the expressive arts (dance, song, poetry or drama) and Poetry Therapy can be
71 Wilfred Owen, ‘The Complete Poems’, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, 1990), page 192. The same words are
also engraved on the Great War poets’ Westminster Abbey plaque.
72 But arguably Auden’s comments are misunderstood and taken out of context. They were part of his elegy for WB
Yeats. A poet, who he admired greatly and who was absolutely convinced that poetry could make things happen. Yeats
believed that his work, ‘Easter 1916’, had inspired men to take up weapons against British rule in Ireland.
73 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zmc6f .
15

defined as ‘the writing and reading of poetry as a means of expressing and exploring thoughts,
feelings and behavior (sic) in order to bring about therapeutic change’. 74 There are now an
increasing number of organisations that encourage the use of Poetry Therapy. In the USA there is
the National Association for Poetry Therapy, founded on the pioneering work of Eli Greifer, a
professional pharmacist and lawyer (and a poet) who believed fervently in the healing power of a
poem’s didactic message and this is now acknowledged and credible source of psychiatric value in
the USA. 75 The UK is catching up and there is a nascent base of Poetry Therapy advice and
services. All of these organisations are able to point to medical and psychological evidence that
supports their thesis that poetry can help cure.
Perhaps recognising the importance of the therapeutic value, and after consultation with its clinical
psychologists, the MOD has now offered its full support to another John Jeffcock poetry project.
This will be an anthology of poetry and prose giving voice to the injured– be it physical or mental
injuries - and the bereaved. No doubt there may be those who see such a project as self-serving and
voyeuristic, but the intent is to offer a voice to those who perhaps are not often heard. Profits will
go to the Army Benevolent Fund. Of course it remains to be seen what sort of editorial control the
MOD will wish to extract as the quid pro quo for its support. But this anthology will serve two key
purposes. Firstly it will allows the injured and the bereaved to put their feelings, however shocking,
into words that may help them come to terms with their horrific life altering wounds and their loss.
Secondly their words will once again remind us all of the pity of the war and the heavy price that
must be paid for ‘the continuation of politics by other means’.
Securing the National Record
Finally, today’s contemporary British war poetry may be a small body of work, but it nonetheless
must play its part in contributing to the national historical and sociological record. The national
obligation to collect and to remember is best summarised in the purpose of the Imperial War
Museum (IWM) – ‘to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of
modern war and ‘wartime experience’’. 76 It was opened on 9 th June 1920 with its terms of
reference limited to the Great War. Subsequently these were expanded to cover the Second World
War and from 1953, its remit is to cover all British military operations in which the country has
been engaged. The National Army Museum has a similar function – ‘(it) communicates the
importance of the history and heritage of the British Army […] the importance of the role the Army
plays in the global community’. 77 These two national institutions (and many other military and
non-military museums) house vast collections of military paraphernalia, which include written
narratives, diaries and poetry, and to which succeeding generations can turn to look, learn,
understand, and, as necessary, be warned. We must ensure that such collections remain organic and
reflect every aspect of today’s national engagement in this century’s conflicts.
THE RELEVANCE OF POETRY TODAY
On the basis of research and analysis so far, the evidence clearly supports the opening assertion that
British war poetry is being written today. Yet this seems almost counter-intuitive in the internet
age. Blogs, tweets, social networking sites and email have become the pre-eminent means of
communicating to the wider world; and in these egalitarian times, when we take it as a right to be
able to offer opinions on anything and everything, the internet gives us access, immediacy and a
ready-made audience. So why go to the bother of condensing thoughts and emotions into verse
74 http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Poetry_therapy
75 For more on the NAPT, see their website http://wwwpoetrytherapy.org/index.html
76 www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.213
77 www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/about-us
16

when there is ‘a zeitgeist feeling that poetry is as much a part of modern day life as clog dancing’ 78
And more importantly why should we care if it is being written
Firstly there is a moral and philosophical argument, best exemplified by Seamus Heaney. In 1990,
whilst Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, he lectured on, and published, the ‘Redress of
Poetry’ where the desired effect is ‘a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or
constantly threatened by circumstances’:
If you are an English poet at the Front during World War 1, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war
effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916
executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at
the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these
cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who
might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to
add a complication where the general desire is for simplification. Such countervailing gestures frustrate the
common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. Their very power to exacerbate is one
guarantee of their effectiveness.
Perhaps these are the examples of what Heaney claims that poetry can represent -‘something like an
exercise of the virtue of hope’. In citing the French philosopher, Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and
Grace’ in which ‘Obedience to the force of gravity (is the) greatest sin’, Heaney is making a
profound argument for poetry’s fundamental relevance as a necessary balancing function in
whatever passes for our fleeting reality. 79
But Why Poetry
A less philosophical argument is proposed by Andrew Motion, who does not believe that we should
be persuaded by the prevailing zeitgeist perception that he cites He is adamant that, despite the
technological advances of the twenty-first century, poetry is fundamentally a primeval response and
that it remains a relevant, valid and powerful vehicle for expression. 80 As Fiona Sampson also
puts it, poetry is a way of saying to the reader or listener – ‘I’m going up a gear, pay attention’ –
and this is reflected in many aspects of our lives, from the sublime to the ridiculous. 81 There is the
poetry of established religion in its ritualistic and liturgical splendour. On Remembrance Day,
Binyon’s Lines are solemnly intoned. Polls compete to tell us the Nation’s favourite poems. St
Valentine’s Day is normally marked by the publication of yet another anthology of love poetry.
London Underground carriages display poems from past and present for our amusement alongside
less sophisticated advertising headlines. Greetings cards for all occasions contain verse (no matter
how excruciating). Makeshift shrines appear at the sides of the roads or by blood-stained
pavements marking the death of individuals, which bear flowers and hand written poems. Parish
priests accommodate relatives who wish to read poetry (either well known verse or their own lines)
at births, marriages and funerals. All of these separate, but connected, examples reinforce Motion’s
observation. Humans need to communicate experience and, in particular, those cathartic
experiences such as combat. Some choose to do so in the form of verse, consciously seeking to
attach greater emphasis to their efforts. Heaney’s and Motion’s observations help us to understand
why service personnel, who would not normally think to pick up a pen to address their emotions in
peacetime, turn to poetry as the combat experience makes them increasingly emotionally
empathetic and receptive, despite lacking finely tuned literary skills and despite the advent of the
blogosphere.
78 Andrew Motion, in conversation with the author, 11 th January 2011.
79 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Redress of Poetry’, ‘Oxford Lectures’, (Faber and Faber, 1995), pages 1-16.
80 Andrew Motion, in conversation with the author, 11 th January 2011.
81 Fiona Sampson, in conversation with the author, 28 th January 2011.
17

But Does Anybody Still Read Poetry
This leads us to the broader issue of whether poetry has a place in the literary marketplace today.
Despite the smartly stocked, bookshopped shelves, it is true that poetry remains a niche publishing
market. An established poet would be delighted if his/her most recent publication sold five
thousand copies, but sales of two to three thousand copies are more realistic. More recently,
although there was a high profile launch for ‘Laurels & Donkeys’ in Portcullis House, its
subsequent sales have been minimal. We might deduce that the audience for poetry remains limited
at best – and at a time when a slim volume of fifty or so pages costs £7.99, one could infer that
people would rather spend their limited cash on other higher priority items. But too much attention
on sales figures does, however, overlook other media through which people can access poetry. The
online website ‘Poetry Archive’ tells a different story. It receives two hundred and fifty thousand
hits every month (a hit being measured by someone spending at least thirty minutes on the site)
implying that approximately two million pages of poetry are being read on line at this one site every
month. The www.warpoetry.co.uk website receives an average of sixty thousand visitors every
month and last year that rose to one hundred thousand during November. The Poetry Society
quarterly review sells approximately fifteen thousand copies every month. Further the Poetry
Society receives something in the order of forty thousand ‘amateur’ poems for review and potential
publication every year. 82
PROPOSITIONS
This section will now attempt to address the ‘so what’ question that must inevitably occur to even
the most casual reader. Thus far the dissertation has sought to demonstrate through fact and
analysis that there is a small, but nonetheless relevant body of contemporary poetic work that meets
a broad definition of war poetry. It has argued that this body of work, produced from a variety of
diffuse sources, represents an important element in the continuing interaction of man and his
relationship with war and that there are distinct roles and functions for war poetry in today’s society
that other media can not solely fulfil. Moreover, arguments have been offered to show that poetry,
in its widest sense, remains a powerful, relevant and necessary medium of discourse for which there
is an audience. What follows is now a set of propositions that, if implemented (or, at the very least,
considered), might better encourage, support and sustain today’s war poetry, in all its guises,
ensuring that it is given the profile it deserves.
The Deployed War Poet: Pour Encourager Les Autres
If there are some fundamental hurdles of artistic integrity and credibility to overcome in order to
allow our established poets to write convincingly about today’s wars, then perhaps the time has
come to consider the deployment of poets to our war zones. There are no end of examples of
writers, film crews and documentary makers being given access to deployed British troops in order
to portray their story. MOD policy has been to embed journalists with front line troops and to
facilitate those projects, which it believes will communicate its messages accurately to a wide
domestic audience. The example was also cited earlier of the MOD’s continued collaboration with
the IWM and its War Artist programme.
It might be deduced that the MOD does not necessarily view a poet as the ideal vehicle for its
propaganda, but more a ‘wasted slot at the cost of someone else’. 83 Perhaps this helps to explain
why a proposal that Motion (the then Poet Laureate) accompany the CGS on one of his many visits
to Afghanistan in 2009 failed to materialise. It might also shed light on why a project between
Simon Armitage (cited earlier for the publication of ‘The Not Dead’) and a film-maker Roger
Courtier to visit Afghanistan in 2009 to produce a one hour film titled ‘Behind the Lines’ was
82 Andrew Motion, Fiona Sampson, Jon Jeffcock and Jon Stallworthy, in conversations separately with the author, on
11 th January, 28 th January and 1 st February 2011 respectively.
83 An MOD official, in conversation with the author, 14 th January 2011.
18

eported as ‘still in its infancy and in the hands of the BBC and the MOD’, and that subsequently
there is no evidence to suggest that anything came of it. 84 Both examples are wasted opportunities.
Armitage had recognised the lack of first hand experience to inform his work, ‘The Not Dead’,
stating that ‘there was something missing from that book, I couldn’t see it at the time, but I realised
later that it missed the present tense, the adrenaline that flares up through real experience’. 85 Of
course, not everyone in poetic circles agreed to the notion of Armitage’s visit to Afghanistan.
Vivien Noakes, an expert on Ivor Gurney, an editor of a Great War poetry anthology and an
informed critic, urged artistic caution – (saying) ‘a lot of the Great War poets were great war poets
because they had been immersed in what they were describing. And they were speaking for their
men. Somebody who has just been sent out won’t have that. A lot depends on how long a writer is
at war and if they are a combatant. Of course a poet can give the view of a sensitive outsider, but
you can almost become a voyeur if you are not careful’. 86
There have been poets who have sought to overcome the lack of credible, first hand experience by
taking themselves off to a war zone. Two examples are worth considering. Firstly there is WH
Auden’s commitment to engage in the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver, whose
justification was ‘I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier, but how else can I speak to/for them’.
Following his deployment on the back of a headline in the Daily Worker on 12 th January 1937
(‘Famous poet to drive ambulance in Spain’), he fell ill, failed to get behind the wheel and arrived
home after a only short time away on 2 nd March 1937. The embarrassingly short time away,
brought on by a total disillusionment with the Republican cause, ended Auden’s pronouncements
on the war. 87 By way of contrast, John Balaban, an American poet, Quaker and conscientious
objector, disagreed fundamentally with the war aims of his country. Notwithstanding this, he went
to Vietnam with the International Volunteer Service as a means of counter-balancing the more
destructive efforts of his fellow countrymen and taught at a Vietnamese university. Wounded by
shrapnel during the Tet Offensive, after his recovery, he continued to work in an orphanage to save
burned and injured children until 1969. After a short absence, he returned again to Vietnam in 1971
to work on ‘Ca Dao Viet Nam’, a collection of poems in the Ca Dao folk tradition. He published
his first collection of verse in 1974. 88 Although there must be opportunities for today’s poets to
find non-combatant employment in the war zone of Afghanistan, Balaban’s courage and conviction
to understand war at first hand in order to bear witness are unlikely to be repeated in such a selfless
and committed fashion.
There is an alternative, from which the United Kingdom and the MOD can learn. On 6 th June 2001,
the Canadian CDS officially announced the creation of the Canadian Forces Artists Program (sic)
(CFAP) which ‘provides a range of unique opportunities to support the independent, creative work
of professional Canadian artists of all cultures to the history of the Canadian Forces […]
professional Canadian artists have the opportunity to research, understand and reflect on the
participation of men and women in the Canadian Forces in a wide variety of activities at home and
abroad’. 89 This looks broadly similar to the MOD and IWM War Artist programme, but with a
distinct difference. In 2008 Suzanne Steele, a poet, successfully proposed that she join the
programme to record the Canadian soldier’s experience through her poetry, reflecting ‘the
challenges, humour and the realities of the contemporary Canadian soldier’. 90 In order to counter
any suggestion that she would merely dip a toe into military life on operations, Steele immersed
herself in interviewing military personnel, visiting bases, training centres and exercises with the 1 st
84 ‘BBC plans to send poet to Afghanistan battlefields, The Observer, 24 th May 2009, page 7.
85 Op Cit.
86 Op Cit
87 Rainer Emig, ‘Unwriting the Good Fight’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall
(Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 265.
88 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Balaban
89 http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/gal/ap-pa/index-eng.asp
90 Op Cit.
19

Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry over an 18 month period, before deploying in
November 2009 to Kandahar for a month - ‘I had the privilege of watching a battalion travel its
road to war and specifically watched a rifle company being born in ’08, do its work-up training,
deploy in ’09 (to ’10), come home, then disband’. 91 Her work to date reflects the bonds that were
forged, as well as her own observations. Her web site – www.warpoet.ca/ - has received over
75,000 hits. Her work is neither pro nor anti war – ‘pro/anti; to me war simply is. And that’s worth
writing about’. 92 Her aim is to reflect the voices of the soldiers that she has met and who continue
to correspond with her. What is clear is that her experiences of war and the soldiers in combat
zones have had a profound and absorptive effect on her work. And no matter what she might have
to say, the Canadian Forces have not attempted to enforce any form of censorship over her work,
perhaps demonstrating a maturity and transparency that is less evident in our own MOD.
This particular programme does show that it is possible for an established poet to be given the
necessary access to soldiers and war, over an extended period, and produce poetry that is credible,
valid and for which there is a clearly a wider audience than just the men of a battalion and their
families. Whether there is the appetite amongst the established (and perhaps amongst the less
established) poets in this country or in the MOD to countenance such a project needs careful
appraisal. Factors such as self-aggrandisement, balance, commitment, credible witness and
censorship would need to be weighed carefully. Yet if there is no appetite, then we must look at
how we can better support our own fledgling soldier-poets.
A British Operation HOMECOMING
The US National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) set up Operation HOMECOMING in 2004 to ‘help
US troops and their families (to) write about their wartime experience […] some of America’s most
distinguished writers have conducted workshops at military installations […] a related ongoing call
for writing submissions has resulted in more than 1,200 submissions and 12,000 pages of
writings’. 93 Whilst serving as Chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, a published poet and Stanford
MBA, was the driving force behind the set-up of Operation HOMECOMING. 94 This was the first
time that the NEA had targeted an exclusive military audience. Importantly, Gioia achieved the
necessary bipartisan support in both Congress and the Senate and secured the project’s funding
through Boeing. It led to the establishment of twenty-eight creative writing schools across the US
for US troops and their families and an anthology was subsequently published in 2006, and a further
expanded edition was published in 2008. 95 Profits from sales are used to enhance the delivery of
arts and cultural programmes in US military communities.
Gioia’s lifelong commitment to making poetry available as a mainstream activity was at the heart of
his chairmanship of the NEA. In an earlier essay 96 he had argued that poetry as an art form had
become too elitist (comments articulated by John Jeffcock and others met in the course of research
for this dissertation); indeed Gioia gave up his poetic studies at Harvard University and chose
Stanford instead because – ‘Its bad as a society if you have all your poets at a university. There
should be a broader life experience open to writers […] I was being taught a professional language
that was spoken by (only) about 600, 700 people in the world’. 97 It was not all plain sailing for
91 Suzanne Steele, in correspondence with the author, 13 th Janaury 2011.
92 Ibid, 11 th Janaury 2011.
93 http://www.nea.gov/national/homecoming/index.html
94 For further information on Dana Gioia, see his website http://www.danagioia.net/about/ . Also note that on 13 th
November 2006, the eminent US publication, ‘Business Week’, referred to him as ‘the man who saved the NEA […]
has steered the once-moribund arts agency in mostly mainstream directions – and its thriving’,
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dpflash/content/nov2006/db20061110_443169.htm
95 Ed. Andrew Carroll, ‘Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of US Troops
and their Families’, (Random House, 2006).
96 Dana Gioia, ‘Can Poetry Matter’, ‘Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture’, (Graywolf, 1992)
97 http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dpflash/content/nov2006/db20061110_443169_page_2.htm
20

Gioia, however, and his project had its detractors – ‘Are these returning troops once again being
used as a shield against the scrutiny of the very policy which put them in harm’s way in the first
place’ 98 Its critics point out that Operation HOMECOMING may be no more than a government’s
propaganda tool. Other veterans, now poets themselves, have questioned whether the immediate
responses of returning veterans can be sufficiently balanced to be trusted – ‘As returning veterans,
they are far too close to the war to trust their own immediate responses; they all need to come to
terms with what they’ve been through and what they’ve seen, and then they’ll be ready to tell the
stories that no one wants to hear’. 99 But equally the programme has its supporters. Brian Turner is,
for example, a grateful recipient of the programme’s support. 100
Putting aside the poetic politics once again, Operation HOMECOMING has provided an important
historical and sociological record at the very least and has given the wider US domestic audience an
insight into its service personnel and their families. It is an attractive model and, learning from it,
and in collaboration with Boeing Defence UK Limited, IWM set up the ‘War Story’ programme.
The programme started in Autumn 2009 and, working with service personnel who volunteer, it
seeks to gather, record and share the personal experiences of today’s Afghanistan conflict using a
variety of oral and written media; the programme is ongoing.
The fundamental differences between Operation HOMECOMING and War Story are twofold.
Firstly there has been no attempt to enable expert academics to work with service personnel and
their families in order to better articulate their experiences. Secondly, the IWM has chosen not to
follow a literary model, preferring instead more immediate verbal responses. 101 That is not to say
that such a programme can not be delivered in the UK. Given the level of support of Boeing and
Boeing Defence UK Limited, in both this country and the US, funding for a British version of
Operation HOMECOMING would not surely be a limiting factor. Whether there is sufficient
support from academics and writers is not clear. There has certainly been one informal offer of
academic support from Oxford academics, spearheaded by Jon Stallworthy, to support, encourage
and collaborate with servicemen returning from Afghanistan who might want to articulate their
experiences in prose, poetry and even drama. 102 Their informal offer of support has yet to be taken
up. This might reflect a complete lack of interest from the local regiment. More likely is that the
demanding and compressed schedules of today’s regiments leave little room to engage in such
activities. Perhaps the ‘Jeffcock Injured Voices’ collaboration, to which the dissertation referred
earlier, is an example of how a poet can work fruitfully with service personnel. It does seem,
however, that without a more concerted and coordinated centrist approach, any British imitation of
Operation HOMECOMING will lack a coherent and ambitious vision that can grab the attention of
service personnel, their families and the British public.
Collating the Present to Secure the Future
Although a couple of collections of contemporary war poetry have been cited, these have been
relatively slim books produced in partnership with charities and without the backing of a major
publisher and access to their markets. More fundamentally however, the question must be whether
this work could connect with a wider and potentially more critical audience. Frankly the market has
yet to be fully tested. Despite the valiant efforts of notable individuals cited here, there has neither
yet been a concerted effort to collect and collate the works of today’s service personnel and nor has
there yet been a comprehensive anthology drawing on the best representations of today’s soldier
poets.
98 Eleanor Wilner, ‘Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance’, Poetry Magazine, (October 2004).
99 Bruce Weigl, Bronze Star Vietnam War veteran, author of seven poetry books, cited by Eleanor Wilner, ibid.
100 Brian Turner, in conversation with the author, 24 th January 2011.
101 Roger Tolson (Director Collections IWM), in correspondence with the author, 18 th February 2011.
102 The Rifles, as Oxford’s local regiment were approached through its regimental hierarchy. Jon Stallworthy, in
conversation with the author, 1 st February 2011.
21

Hugh Haughton sets out the arguments for and against the War Poetry anthology in his recent essay
‘Anthologising War’and gives us a blow-by-blow account of its evolution. 103 His essay makes
clear that the War Poetry Anthology has been one of the biggest market leaders since the end of the
Great War. Whilst, yet again, there are poetic semantics and politics at play over what does and
does not constitute a memorable anthology, the inescapable conclusions are that the conflicts since
the end of the Cold War have not been anthologised sufficiently and that there are opportunities to
do so.
Perhaps there has been insufficient motive to focus exclusively on today’s soldier-poets, because
the poetry establishment or their publishers have yet to be presented with a ‘memorable’ poem from
either Afghanistan or Iraq that challenges either linguistically and stylistically. 104 But that is not to
say that it can not happen – ‘a good poet is lucky to be struck by lightening half a dozen times in his
life, a great poet perhaps a dozen’. 105 Fundamentally, there is no one positioned, nor sufficiently
interested, to spot the lightening strikes that can allow us to make the necessary discriminatory,
critical decisions as to what could be more widely published. Whilst there is a persuasive line of
argument that too much ‘bad’ poetry does more harm than good by devaluing the status of
‘memorable speech’, there remains a risk that poetry will become ever more insular and insulated
from real world events. We should applaud, support and emulate Dana Gioia’s assertion that poetry
can and must be a mainstream activity. Greater visibility over what is out there must be the starting
point, and, with the right encouragement and focus, either from the IWM or in a British version of
Operation HOMECOMING, it could start to uncover hidden poetic treasures. There are then any
number of permutations that could be used to construct a new anthology for a twenty-first century
audience: the juxtaposition of established poet with soldier-poet; an exclusive focus on soldierpoets;
service families and the bereaved; the injured; the civilian voice; British and international;
and so on. The challenge is there. Thus far it seems that it is only individual and unrelated projects,
often funded from personal means, such as Priscilla Dicketts’ ‘Dark Clouds and Silver Linings’,
that have the courage to meet this challenge head on.
IN CONCLUSION
We began with a seemingly straightforward question drawn from Cecil Day Lewis – ‘Where are the
war poets’ In addressing the question, this dissertation has demonstrated that there is a diverse and
rich legacy of British poetic responses to conflict. This legacy has evolved over many hundreds of
years, and although it has been most acutely felt in the national psyche following the Great War and
the Second World War, it is still a legacy that must be added to for succeeding generations. Today
there are a small, but credible number of soldier-poets and civilian non-combatants who express
their engagement with conflict in a poetic discourse. There are also established poets who have
sought to understand and respond to today’s conflicts in their work. For some the poems continue a
challenging commentary on the human condition. For others the poems are opportunities to come
to terms with life changing experiences. This dissertation has argued that this rich, diverse and
fascinating seam of work from the twenty-first century is as vital and as necessary now as it ever
has been. Whilst it must compete against more immediate and accessible forms of communication
and media, it nonetheless deserves our national encouragement, support and energy. Perhaps the
best answer to the question posed in the title is to quote Kiedrich Rhys’, another poet and literary
journalist of C Day Lewis’ time. Today’s war poets are where they have always been - ‘they are
103 For further background, see Hugh Haughton, ‘Anthologizing War’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War
Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 421-444.
104 ‘I have yet to see a poem about ‘our [latest] Asian war’ that is worth the paper it is written on’, Jon Stallworthy, ‘The
Fury and the Mire’, ‘Survivors’ Songs’, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), page 195.
105 Jon Stallworthy, in conversation with the author, 1 st February 2011.
22

under your nose’. 106 We can still learn from other nations’ efforts to secure an intellectual, artistic,
historical and sociological record for future generations. However we might go about that task, it is
clear that more, much more, can and must be done by both the poetry establishment and the MOD
to ensure that contemporary British War Poetry from the first decade of the twenty-first century is
collected, collated, celebrated and communicated to as wide an audience as possible. 107 The
challenge is whether this country has the energy, wit and wisdom to do so in a responsible manner.
106 Kiedrich Rhys, ‘Introduction’, ‘Poems from the Forces’, (1941), cited by High Haughton, ‘Anthologizing War’, The
Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), page 432.
107 And whilst the British poetry establishment and the MOD might seem odd bedfellows, it is worth noting the
comments of Douglas Wilson, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Pentagon: ‘There is an assumption that the
arts and our men and women in uniform are from different planets. Its not the case. The arts can provide a means to
discuss and explore.’, ‘Theatre of War: British give US troops and Afghan history lesson’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 th
February 2011.
23

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Armitage, Simon, The Not Dead, Pomona Press, 2008.
Astley Neil (ed.), Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, Bloodaxe Books, 2002.
Auden, WH, Another Time, Random House, 1940.
Baker, Kenneth (ed.), The Faber Book of War Poetry, Faber & Faber, 1997.
Carroll, Andrew (ed.), Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front in the
Words of US Troops and their Families, Random House, 2006.
Day Lewis, Cecil, The Complete Poems, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992.
Dicketts, Priscilla (ed.), Dark Cloud and Silver Linings: A collection of writings by serving British
servicemen and women, their families and friends, PSF Publications, 2010.
Douglas, Keith, Alamein to Zem Zem, Faber & Faber, 2008.
Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Gioia, Dana, Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Graywolf, 1992.
Harsent, David, Legion, Faber & Faber, 2005.
Harvey, AD, The Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War, The Hambledon Press, 1998.
Heaney, Seamus, The Redress of Poetry: The Oxford Lectures, Faber & Faber, 1995.
Hecht, Anthony, Collected Earlier Poems, Random House, 1990.
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Constable, 2008.
Jeffcock, John, The Book of War, Kassala Publishing, 2009.
Johnston, John H, English Poetry of the First World War: A study in the Evolution of Lyric and
Narrative Form, Princetown University Press, 1964.
Keegan, Paul and Hollis, Matthew (ed.), 101 Poems Against War, Faber & Faber 2003.
Kendall, Tim (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, Oxford University Press,
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Kendall, Tim, Modern English War Poetry, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Maguire, Sarah, The Pomegranates of Kandahar, Chatto & Windus, 2007.
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Motion, Andrew, Laurels and Donkeys, Clutag Press, 2010.
Motion, Andrew, The Cinder Path, Faber & Faber, 2009.
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Publishing, 2000.
Pine, Richard and Patten, Eve (ed.), Literatures of War, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
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Swift, Todd (ed.), 100 Poets Against the War, Salt Publishing, 2003.
Stallworthy, Jon (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1984.
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Stallworthy, Jon, Survivors’ Songs, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Stallworthy, Jon, Rounding The Horn – Collected Poems, Carcanet, 2005.
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Turner, Brian, Here Bullet, Bloodaxe Books, 2007.
Turner, Brian, Phantom Noise, Bloodaxe Books, 2010.
Wylie, Michael (ed.), The War Poets: An Anthology, Pitkin Publishing, 2010.
24

Journal Articles
Pennell, Bruce, ‘Where are the War Poets’, British Army Review, Number 136, Spring 2005.
Wilner, Eleanor, ‘Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance’, Poetry Magazine, October 2004.
Newspaper Articles
Duffy, Carol Ann, ‘Exit Wounds’, The Guardian, 25 July 2009.
Harrison, Tony, ‘A Cold Coming’, The Guardian, 14 February 2003.
McFarlane, Andy, ‘Repatriation’, The Daily Mail, 17 August, 2009.
Motion, Andrew, ‘Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War – Review’, The Guardian, 13
November 2010.
Sampson, Fiona, ‘Poetic reports on today’s Front Line’, The Independent, 29 th October 2010.
Spillius, Alex, ‘Theatre of War: British give US troops an Afghan history lesson’, The Daily
Telegraph, 12 February 2011.
Thorpe, Vanessa, ‘PJ Harvey to be offered chnace to become ‘official war song correspondent’’,
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Wagner, Erica, ‘The Real War Poets’, The Times, 8 August 2009.
Wheatley, David, ‘Posturing for Peace’, The Guardian, 25 May 2003.
‘BBC plans to send poet to Afghanistan battlefields’, The Observer, 24 May 2009.
Editorial, The Times, 6 January 2011.
‘Theatrical Troops’, The Times, 11 January 2011.
Web Sites
Sam Hamill’s call to poetic arms: www.poetsagainstthewar.org
For further background on ‘100 Poets Against The War’:
www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1876857986.htm
For further background on ‘The Highway of Death’ and International War Crimes Tribunal:
http://deoxy.org.wc/wc-death.htm
The Wilfred Owen Association:
www.wilfredowen.org.uk/wilfred-owen-association/wilfred-owen-poetry-award
Harold Pinter:
www.haroldpinter.org/poetry/poetry_football.htm
Random House Publishers:
www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display
The web based Forces Poetry forum, a subset of Forces Literary Organisation Worldwide:
www.forcespoetry.com
A new repository for today’s war poetry run by David Roberts, himself a published poet:
www.warpoetry.co.uk
For further background on ‘Silver Linings and Dark Clouds’:
www.priscialldickettsco.uk/
For further background on ‘The King James Bible: The Book that Changed the World’:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zmc6f
A definition of poetry therapy:
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Poetry_therapy
The home site of the US based National Association for Poetry Therapy:
http://wwwpoetrytherapy.org/index.html
The Imperial War Museum home site:
www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.213
The National Army Museum home site:
www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/about-us
25

The home site of Suzanne Steele:
www.warpoet.ca/
Further background on John Balaban:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Balaban
The home site for the Canadian Forces Artists Programme:
http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/gal/ap-pa/index-eng.asp
The home site for the US National Endowment of the Arts:
http://www.nea.gov/national/homecoming/index.html
The home site for Dana Gioia:
http://www.danagioia.net/about/
A web article from Business Week on Dana Gioia:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dpflash/content/nov2006/db20061110_443169.htm
Ibid:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dpflash/content/nov2006/db20061110_443169_page_2.htm
Research Interviews (I) and Correspondence (C)
Astley, Neil, Poet, Publisher Bloodaxe Books. (C)
Brown, JB, Poet, British Army. (C)
Chiswell, James, British Army, Brigade Commander in Helmand. (C)
Dicketts, Priscilla, Poet, Publisher PSF Publications. (I) & (C)
Jeffcock, John, Poet, businessman. (I) & (C)
Kendall, Tim, Academic, Exeter University. (C)
Marr, Peter, Father, retired British Army. (C)
McMillan, Ian, Poet. (C)
McNeillie, Andrew, Publisher, Clutag Press. (C)
Motion, Andrew, Poet, Academic, Royal Holloway. (I) & (C)
Ogilvie-Laing, Gerald, Artist, retired British Army. (I) & (C)
Riley, Erin, Producer, BBC Radio 3. (C)
Saddington, Justin, Curatorial Officer, National Army Museum. (C)
Sampson, Fiona, Poet, Editor Poetry Society Review. (I) & (C)
Stallworthy, Jon, Poet, academic, Wolfson College, Oxford. (I) & (C)
Steele, Suzanne, Canadian poet. (C)
Stewart, Janet, Academic, Aberdeen University. (C)
Tolson, Roger, Director Collections, The Imperial War Museum. (C)
Turner, Brian, Poet. (I) & (C)
White, Jon, Poet, British Army. (C)
26

ANNEX - SELECTED POEMS
1. A poem about Poems About Vietnam (Jon Stallworthy)
The spotlights had you covered [thunder
in the wings]. In the combat zones
and in the Circle, darkness. Under
the muzzles of the microphones
you opened fire, and a phalanx
of loudspeakers shook the wall;
but all your bullets were blanks
when you were at the Albert Hall.
Lord George Byron cared for Greece,
Auden and Cornford cared for Spain,
confronted bullets and disease
to make their poems’ meaning plain;
but you – by what right did you wear
suffering like a service medal,
numbing the nerve that they laid bare,
when you were at the Albert Hall
The poets of another time –
Owen with a rifle-butt
Between his paper and the slime,
Donne quitting Her pillow to cut
a quill – knew that in love and war
dispatches from the front are all.
We believe them, they were there,
when you were at the Albert Hall.
Poet, they whisper in their sleep
louder from underground than all
the mikes that hung upon your lips
when you were at the Albert Hall.
2. In Times of Peace (John Agard)
That finger - index to be exact -
so used to a trigger's warmth
how will it begin to deal with skin
that threatens only to embrace
Those feet, so at home in heavy boots
and stepping over bodies -
how will they cope with a bubble bath
when foam is all there is for ambush
And what of hearts in times of peace
Will war-worn hearts grow sluggish
like Valentine roses wilting
without the adrenalin of a bullet's blood-rush
27

When the dust of peace has settled on a nation,
how will human arms handle the death of weapons
And what of ears, are ears so tuned to sirens
that the closing of wings causes a tremor
As for eyes, are eyes ready for the soft dance
of a butterfly's bootless invasion
3. Listen (Gillian Clarke)
to the chant that tranced me thirty years ago
in Samarkand: the call to prayer at dawn;
to that voice again, years and miles from then,
in the blood-red mountains of Afghanistan;
to the secret placing of a double-bomb
at a dark hour in a Helmand street;
to the first foot to tread the viper's head,
the scream that ripped the morning's rising heat;
to the widow's wail as she crouches in the rubble
over a son, a brother torn apart;
to a mother dumb with shock who locks her door
and sits alone, taking the news to heart;
to the soldier's words, "It's World War One out here";
to the rattled air, the growl of the grenade;
to a chanting crowd fisting the foetid air;
to a silent Wiltshire town at a last parade;
to ruin ripening in poppy fields;
to barley burnished in the summer air;
to the sound at dusk, cantata of despair,
the holy call become a howl of prayer.
4. Big Ask (Carol Ann Duffy)
(In memory of Adrian Mitchell)
What was it Sisyphus pushed up the hill
I wouldn't call it a rock.
Will you solemnly swear on the Bible
I couldn't swear on a book.
With which piece did you capture the castle
I shouldn't hazard a rook.
28

When did the President give you the date
Nothing to do with Barack!
Were 1200 targets marked on a chart
Nothing was circled in black.
On what was the prisoner stripped and stretched
Nothing resembling a rack.
Guantanamo Bay - how many detained
How many grains in a sack
Extraordinary Rendition - give me some names.
How many cards in a pack
Sexing the Dossier - name of the game
Poker. Gin Rummy. Blackjack.
What's your understanding of 'shock' and 'awe'
I didn't plan the attack.
Once inside the Mosque, describe what you saw.
I couldn't see through the smoke.
Your estimate of the cost of the War
I had no brief to keep track.
Where was Saddam when they found him at last
Maybe holed under a shack.
What happened to him once they'd kicked his ass
Maybe he swung from the neck.
The WMD ... you found the stash
Well, maybe not in Iraq.
5. Afghanistan (Paul Muldoon)
It's getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.
6. Poppies (Jane Weir)
Three days before Armistice Sunday
and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves. Before you left,
I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals,
spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade
of yellow bias binding around your blazer.
Sellotape bandaged around my hand,
I rounded up as many white cat hairs
as I could, smoothed down your shirt's
upturned collar, steeled the softening
of my face. I wanted to graze my nose
across the tip of your nose, play at
being Eskimos like we did when
you were little. I resisted the impulse
to run my fingers through the gelled
29

lackthorns of your hair. All my words
flattened, rolled, turned into felt,
slowly melting. I was brave, as I walked
with you, to the front door, threw
it open, the world overflowing
like a treasure chest. A split second
and you were away, intoxicated.
After you'd gone I went into your bedroom,
released a song bird from its cage.
Later a single dove flew from the pear tree,
and this is where it has led me,
skirting the church yard walls, my stomach busy
making tucks, darts, pleats, hat-less, without
a winter coat or reinforcements of scarf, gloves.
On reaching the top of the hill I traced
the inscriptions on the war memorial,
leaned against it like a wishbone.
The dove pulled freely against the sky,
an ornamental stitch. I listened, hoping to hear
your playground voice catching on the wind.
7. A Cold Coming (Tony Harrison)
I saw the charred Iraqi lean towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen ready to write down thoughts for men,
his windscreen wiper like a quill he's reaching for to make his will.
I saw the charred Iraqi lean like someone made of Plasticine
as though he'd stopped to ask the way and this is what I heard him say:
"Don't be afraid I've picked on you for this exclusive interview.
Isn't it your sort of poet's task to find words for this frightening mask
If that gadget that you've got records words from such scorched vocal cords,
press RECORD before some dog devours me mid-monologue."
So I held the shaking microphone closer to the crumbling bone:
"I read the news of three wise men who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines with sample flasks and magazines,
three wise soldiers from Seattle who banked their sperm before the battle.
Did No 1 say: God be thanked I've got my precious semen banked.
And No 2: O praise the Lord my last best shot is safely stored.
And No 3: Praise be to God I left my wife my frozen wad
So if their fate was to be gassed at least they thought their name would last,
and though cold corpses in Kuwait they could by proxy procreate.
30

Excuse a skull half roast, half bone for using such a scornful tone.
It may seem out of all proportion but I wish I'd taken their precaution.
They seemed the masters of their fate with wisely jarred ejaculate.
Was it a propaganda coup to make us think they'd cracked death too,
disinformation to defeat us with no post-mortem millilitres
Symbolic billions in reserve made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.
On Saddam's pay we can't afford to go and get our semen stored.
Sad to say that such high tech's uncommon here. We're stuck with sex.
If you can conjure up and stretch your imagination (and not retch)
the image of me beside my wife closely clasped creating life . . ."
(I let the unfleshed skull unfold a story I'd been already told,
and idly tried to calculate the content of ejaculate:
the sperm in one ejaculation equals the whole Iraqi nation
times, roughly, let's say, 12.5 though .5's not now alive.
Let's say the sperms were an amount so many times the body count,
2,500 times at least (but let's wait till the toll's released!).
Whichever way Death seems outflanked by one tube of cold bloblings banked.
Poor bloblings, maybe you've been blessed with, of all fates possible, the best
according to Sophocles ie "the best of fates is not to be"
a philosophy that's maybe bleak for any but an ancient Greek
but difficult these days to escape when spoken to by such a shape.
When you see men brought to such states who wouldn't want that "best of fates"
or in the world of Cruise and Scud not go kryonic if he could,
spared the normal human doom of having made it through the womb)
He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool: "I never thought life futile, fool!
Though all Hell began to drop I never wanted life to stop.
I was filled with such a yearning to stay in life as I was burning,
such a longing to be beside my wife in bed before I died,
and, most, to have engendered there a child untouched by war's despair.
So press RECORD! I want to reach the warring nations with my speech.
Don't look away! I know it's hard to keep regarding one so charred,
so disfigured by unfriendly fire and think it once burned with desire.
Though fire has flayed off half my features they once were like my fellow creatures',
till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy from Iowa or Illinois,
equipped by ingenious technophile put paid to my paternal smile
31

and made the face you see today an armature half-patched with clay,
an icon framed, a looking glass for devotees of 'kicking ass',
a mirror that returns the gaze of victors on their victory days
and in the end stares out the watcher who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!
or behind the flag-bedecked page 1 of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!
I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector join their feast as spoiling spectre,
and who'd want to sour the children's joy in Iowa or Illinois
Or ageing mothers overjoyed to find their babies weren't destroyed
But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages don't help peace in future ages.
Stars and Stripes in sticky paws may sow the seeds for future wars.
Each Union Jack the kids now wave may lead them later to the grave.
But praise the Lord and raise the banner (excuse a skull's sarcastic manner!)
Desert Rat and Desert Stormer without the scars and (maybe) trauma,
the semen-bankers are all back to sire their children in their sack.
With seed sown straight from the sower dump second-hand spermatozoa!
Lie that you saw me and I smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
Lie and pretend that I excuse my bombing by B52s,
pretend I pardon and forgive that they still do and I don't live,
pretend they have the burnt man's blessing and then, maybe, I'm spared confessing
that only fire burnt out the shame of things I'd done in Saddam's name,
the deaths, the torture and the plunder the black clouds all of us are under.
Say that I'm smiling and excuse the Scuds we launched against the Jews.
Pretend I've got the imagination to see the world beyond one nation.
That's your job, poet, to pretend I want my foe to be my friend.
It's easier to find such words for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.
So lie and say the charred man smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
This gaping rictus once made glad a few old hearts back in Baghdad,
hearts growing older by the minute as each truck comes without me in it.
I've met you though, and had my say which you've got taped. Now go away."
I gazed at him and he gazed back staring right through me to Iraq.
Facing the way the charred man faced I saw the frozen phial of waste,
a test-tube frozen in the dark, crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,
a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent the chilled suspension of the Present.
Rainbows seven shades of black curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,
and instead of gold the frozen crock's crammed with Mankind on the rocks,
32

the congealed genie who won't thaw until the World renounces War,
cold spunk meticulously jarred never to be charrer or the charred,
a bottled Bethlehem of this come- curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.
I went. I pressed REWIND and PLAY and I heard the charred man say:
8. American Football (Harold Pinter)
Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
9. The Next Thing (Andrew Motion)
My heart stopped but my hands kept working away
I had a job to do. I threw the mortar down the barrel
and waited for the splash to come up, just waited.
It was bang on. The PKM gunner would have shot
his mouth off when my bomb landed on him.
With that done, the next thing was to extract our own –
but lifting a dead body from the ground is not easy.
The first must have weighed fourteen stone; plus radio
he was half a ton. I could not get him off the ground,
not properly, not enough to put him over my shoulder.
I thought, Fucking Jesus! But I managed. It is only right.
Later on we met some elders of the village to discuss
33

the bodies of the enemy; they were shot up very badly.
Two were dressed in black – obviously foreign fighters
with grenades on them and mobile phones and notebooks.
Their skin was strangely waxy and suspicious-looking.
A third was wearing traditional dress with a red sash
and a turban that was off at the time; his eyes were sunk
and had rolled backwards: there was no brain left in there.
I dug a bullet out of the wall behind him with my bayonet
for a keepsake and could clearly see the swirl on the casing.
Then I went down the valley to a stream with the other men
and we stripped to wash our clothes in the water. Last of all
we stayed firm for a while longer to do the clearance patrols.
10. Warriors (Simon Armitage)
It’s just one massive ditch, the border with Kuwait,
and once over the bun line the heart bounces and kicks,
expecting fury unleashed, the mother of all fights,
a million attackers in sandals all armed to the teeth.
But there’s only sand and some goat-boy walking his herd.
The gun turret spins a full 360 degrees – like an owl’s head.
Rumble onward all night till you’re just about cooked.
The section commander gets out for a piss and almost loses his cock.
Crunch over something brittle, plough through something soft,
rounds pinging the metal like jet-propelled wasps,
the Warrior slewing and spinning. It roars forward, then stops.
Range 410 miles, road speed 46 miles per hour – tops.
Banged up for nine hours in half-light and slow heat,
but it’s only the last thirty seconds that truly count,
before the lid comes off. As the last moments are dealt out
some guys scream and shout, bringing their blood to the boil;
others stare into friends’ eyes, right to the back of the skull.
Deployment is via a hydraulic door in the hull.
What happens thereafter, either I won’t say, or can’t.
To survive, good infantrymen keep their emotions locked
and imaginations screwed shut. If not, the door of the truck
becomes like the back of an old-fashioned camera: open it up
and the sun floods in, blazes the film, and you’re fucked.
A Rolls Royce V8 Condor engine grinds sand in its guts.
11. The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Sarah Maguire)
The bald heft of ordnance
A landmine
shrapnel cool in its shell
Red balls
pinioned in pyramids
34

ough deal tables stacked to the sky
A mirrored shawl
Splits
and dozens tumble down –
careering through the marketplace
joyful fruit
caught by the shouts of barefoot children
Assembled, they are jewels –
jewels
of garnet, jewels of ruby
A promise deep as the deep red of poppies
of rouged lips (concealed)
Proud hearts
built of rubble
Come, let us light candles in the dust
and prise them apart –
thrust your knife through the globe
then twist
till the soft flesh cleaves open
to these small shards of sweetness
Tease each jellied cell
from its white fur of membrane
till a city explodes in your mouth
Harvest of goodness
harvest of blood
12. The Hurt Locker (Brian Turner)
Nothing but hurt left here.
Nothing but bullets and pain
and the bled-out slumping
and all the fucks and goddamns
and Jesus Christs of the wounded.
Nothing left here but the hurt.
Believe it when you see it.
Believe it when a twelve-year-old
rolls a grenade in the room.
Or when a sniper punched a hole
deep into someone’s skull.
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
35

and see what is there of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.
13. The Promise of Things to Come (JB Brown)
Huzan haunts me;
it rises impatient,
weaving inside my heart,
calling to my soul.
Only the foolish desire,
moments of frantic fear, amongst
shards, flying almost by instinct,
hissing and spitting furious
flechettes and heat
shedding copper jacketed poison,
inverting and shredding the air.
Who would choose such a fate
With nothing to show
but memories of pain,
a glint of hanging metal
broken fragments of triumph,
and only blood to slake the serpent,
with the promise of things to come.
14. Indirect Fire (Tony Davies)
A whooshing sound
Appetizer for a shuddering boom
That starts a hammering heart.
Face pushed into brick
Cold, musky
Each boom a release
Frantic
Trembling hands reach
For the Kevlar comfort blanket
Ending as suddenly as it began
Normal life resumes
Urgency, activity
Are there any
ANY
Lying silently
Waiting to unleash molten death
In the quiet a voice announces
“I don’t want to be here anymore!”
36

Laughter
No-one was scared
Not the next day
When the top ten tunes are circulated
No 3
Boom bang a bang – by Lulu
No 2
Something in the air tonight –
by Phil Collins
No 1
Rocket Man – by Elton John
Its really funny
The next day
When everyone’s still here to laugh about it
15. Soldier with a Tattoo (David Hamilton)
Ink mocks the shredded flesh anew,
emblazoned yet devoid of glory.
“Unscarred”, his belly boasts in blue.
Where limbs succumbed, the brain stayed true,
throughout a conflict, dark and gory,
Ink mocks the shredded flesh anew.
He proudly stands, one of the few,
to tell us his noble story.
“Unscarred”, his belly boasts in blue.
Be mindful! If not him then you,
could head the surgeon’s inventory.
Ink mocks the shredded flesh anew.
When nightmares wake as nightmares do,
will dreams be skirmished by history>
“Unscarred”, his belly boasts in blue.
Young hero, bravely tell me true
could will alone repel the fury
Ink mocks the shredded flesh anew
“Unscarred”, his belly boasts in blue.
16. Elegantly Sufficient (John Jeffcock)
In Sarajevo we tried to feed the women
They were hungry but would not eat
It was two weeks before we asked them why
37

Before we gave them rations to take home
Their families were starving
In the Gulf we collected food
From the trenches for the prisoners
Gave it to the officers to distribute to the other ranks.
They shared nothing
And ate it in front of their men
On whose shoulders they had gained promotion
17. Reaptriation (Andy McFarlane)
The leviathan of the sky does land
In England's green and pleasant land.
Its cargo more precious than gold
The body of a hero, bold.
Once the giant's engines stopped
The cargo ramp is gently dropped
Carried by six on shoulders true
The hero is saluted by the crew.
The coffin draped in Union Jack
Is slowly carried out the back.
Out of the dark and into light
Slowly down the ramp and to the right.
The six approach the hearse all black
And place the hero gently in the back.
The six then turn and march away
Their duty has been done this day.
Politicians usually have much to say
No sign of them near here this day.
They hide away and out of danger,
Much easier if the hero is a stranger.
The hearse with its precious load
Moves slowly out onto the road.
The floral tributes line the route
While comrades snap a smart salute.
At the edge of a Wiltshire town
The cortege slows its pace right down.
The streets are packed, many deep,
Some throw flowers, most just weep.
The crowd have come to say farewell,
The church bell rings a low death knell.
Regimental standards are lowered down
As the hero passed through the town.
38

The cortege stops and silence reigns
The townsfolk feel the family's pain.
The nations' flag lowered to half mast
Our brave hero is home at last.
18. Last Stand (Alex Cockerill)
My last day in the desert
My last day in this sand
I hope I never come back
To this tragic barren land
Many hot days
And many moons have passed
I don’t want to fight this war anymore
My sanity won’t last
Towns have been taken
Towns have been lost
Towns have been taken back again
How many lives has it cost
This war will not end
The stakes are far too high
A few friends are gone already
How many more will die
19. Missing Presumed Dead (Anonymous)
I hear on the news that yet another one has died
My heart goes out to all those they have left behind
It makes me ponder on that terrifying phrase
Those three powerful words
MISSING PRESUMED DEAD
There is a finality there, all fear is there
They have gone.
Yet one clings onto one word more than any other
MISSING
Well, maybe they could be missing
THEY could be mistaken
You suppress any other thoughts that come into your mind
You concentrate on “could be mistaken”
You cling to that one hope you play with the words
Why “presume” You are either dead or you’re not!
Then, you know in your heart, the stark searing pain of reality.
Its true
39

You’ll never see them again as flesh and blood
You’ll never feel them again
You’ll never hold them again
You’ll never hear them again
20. God is a Bullet (Anonymous)
When will the fighting stop
When will we leave this place
Things are getting worse
Its starting to be a disgrace
Everyday we get attacked
I don’t like it anymore
I’m wasting my short life away
Laying on these dusty floors
Too many have passed away
There will be more to come
Its time to pack our bags
Turn around and quickly run
This country’s going to self-destruct
We’re in the firing line
Let’s close this place down
It’s about bloody time
Those that have passed away
Are Mothers, Fathers, Daughters, Sons
I have now seen God
He comes in the form of a gun
I still love the job I do
But I want guidance from above
Do I really want to leave my family
Without the one they love
21. Regay 1 (Anonymous)
I shot this one guy in the face
It only helps he was a nutcase
Through the branches of the tree,
The Taliban soldier falls onto his knees
From the magazine and in to the breech
The tree he was using looked like a beech
I spy on him using my rifle scope
X4 magnifications he had no hope
He was shooting here and there in mad despair
My bullets hit home his face beyond repair.
I had no choice it was the only way
This is how we soldiers earn our pay.
One of the team has also been shot
The medics run over to make the blood clot
We all then move behind a wall,
The bombs are coming arranged by Paul
40

The dust the debris scatter all over the place
The country we fight in is a fucking disgrace
As we move to the HLS
We come under fire from over the crest
This time I have 7.62
1800 rounds so more than a few
A bullet flies past and misses by an inch
I didn’t even have time to flinch
My lead wall goes into the house
Nothing could escape, not even a mouse
The Browning goes off right next to my ear
We round a corner and we are in the clear.
22. Lonely Soldier (poem written on a Helmand Forward Operating Base wall)
Balaclava home from home
With hesco walls and thunder domes
A desert rose for a piss
A curried goat that did the trick!
Full of meat, the men are now,
As we hear another round.
Is it burst or single shot
As we come under full contact.
Ricochet overhead, bury into hesco sack.
What’s that distant sound I hear,
My family, friends I love so dear.
No time for that, no time for tears
I must fight and beat my fears.
Side by side we’re standing tall
For love and peace, not for war
Heart so heavy, full of pain
I want to see my family again
23. 9 liner (SM Steele)
(for Corporal Darren Fitzpatrick, injured Panjwaii, Afghanistan, died Alberta Canada, 2010)
T Triple C. tourniquet. 9-line. Role 3. jet to Germany. fight soldier fight. breathe. hang on. to
different tubes and wires. not twisted trips in dust. cobra traps. lash. the smash the bloody grab.
the blast. the blast. hideous misstep. fuck. IED. fucking fucking IED. your limbs bleed. out
almost gone. O2, Sats, ICU chatter. radio net. 9 liner 9 liner wheeze life support. Black Hawk.
Chinook. whook whook whook whook whook, fast air over KAF. out of there. you must. hang
on. breathe son breathe. we wait we wait. will live to live. will you to live. will you live. hang on
hang on. over the red desert. you’re almost. gone. breathe son. hang on.
41

24. More Light, More Light (Anthony Hecht)
(for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt)
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
‘I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime’
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.
We move now to outside a German wood,
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
42